What must be done on October 14, 2017


WHAT ARE VOTERS IN NEW ORLEANS SUPPOSED TO DO ON OCTOBER 14?

Vote, of course.  Nevertheless, voting intelligently is no easy matter.  We have ideological convictions of some kind, and we want to support candidates who share our prejudices.  The candidates for mayor and city council seats express ideas about their intentions and priorities at forums.  What the candidates for State Treasurer,  Orleans Parish Coroner, and two judgeships --- Court of Appeal, 4th Circuit, 1st District, Division B and Civil District Court-- truly think is voiced only on their websites, in the campaign literature they and their supports distribute.  Although the Coroner need only have skill in forensic medicine and good vision and the Treasurer should assume financial policy is a sacred trust, judges must employ complex legal reasoning to make decisions.  It might be argued that there is less gravity in the duties assigned to a treasure or a coroner than in the duties we entrust to judges.  If we are to make good decisions in electing  candidates for judgeships, it would be helpful to have forums at which they reveal in greater depth what they believe a theory of justice to be and how they employ belief in rendering decisions.  And those forums ought not take the form of donation parties!  Perhaps in some future, voters will demand more accountability of those who wish to be guardians of justice.  I suspect a significant number of voters are mesmerized by subjective endorsements, some of which can actually be "purchased" by candidates.  When I see an endorsement named AGNOR, (does an elephant wearing a fleur-de-lis = A?),  I smell a rat named presumption of voter ignorance.



Six items on the October 14 ballot should be scrutinized before we vote "Yes" or "No."  CA No. 1 (Act 428 SB140) would exempt property tax for construction sites; CA No. 2 (Act 427 HB145) would provide homestead exemption for unmarried surviving spouses of people who have rendered noble public service; CA No. 3 (Act 429 HB 354) would dedicate projected taxes to a construction subfund for transportation infrastructure.  Read the texts for these items carefully.  Read even more carefully the items that ask us to approve or to reject the renewal of millage for PW School Board Propositions A, B, and C-----purchase of textbooks and other supplies; sponsoring programs for improving discipline and decreasing dropouts; funding for salaries, fringe benefits, and productivity incentives for employees.  We need to ask pointed question about these propositions or proposals at Orleans Parish School Board forums that are scheduled during the month of September.  Given the "confederated" rather than "unified" system of education in New Orleans, we need to be vigilant about hidden loopholes.



We harm ourselves if we fail to inform ourselves about the less-than-obvious stakes in the October 14 election.  Vote, of course, but try to do so as intelligently as is possible.  We may not be able to cleanse the new swamp of political ignorance in national affairs for some years, but we are capable of not replicating that swamp in New Orleans when we exercise our civic obligations



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            September 1, 2017

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CLA paper

CLA,   April 6, 2018 Jerry W. Ward, Jr. PHBW:   Negotiating the Ideas of Seven Writers [1]                 Founded in 1983 by Dr. Maryemma Graham, "The Afro-American Novel Project" (AANP) had the initial goal of identifying all published novels written by African Americans from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.   AANP became The Project on the History of Black Writing (PHBW) in 1990 to reflect an enlarged vision and a more ambitious aim.   PHBW want to make a substantial contribution to what we then spoke of as our "Profession" by organizing bibliographic information and databases, sponsoring institutes and seminars, and by encouraging our colleagues to have rigorous engagements with all genres of black (African American) "writing" within   frames   of historical inquiry.                              The Project's   working frame was an   adaptation of the paradigm of unity in African American Studies , f
Read more

reading notes for September 23, 2019

Reading Notes for September 23, 2019 Eighteen years after the tragedy of 9/11 as I re-read Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America" (2001), two meanderings occur: 1) a chance temptation to ask what the term "pro-Semitic" can mean in the contexts of (a) Israeli and world politics and (b) to what extent the amount of foreign aid the USA donates to Israel truly matters, and 2) a more focused temptation to ask if Morrison's Playing in the Dark sheds light on the motives that govern projects devoted to discussions of slavery beginning with 1619. I suspect those projects are at once very literary and very political. Such speculations arose during a September 12 conversation with one of my former UNCF/Mellon mentees whose research on redemption now teaches me, the former mentor, a few things about the urgency of scholarship in the twenty-first century.   The journey forth happens in the cognitive territory of "universal enslavement,"
Read more

SENIOR READERS

SENIOR READERS AND AFRICAN AMERICAN NARRATIVES CLA   11 April 2019 People Program, a continuing education opportunity sponsored by the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph in New Orleans, is a site where cultures of reading are practiced with alacrity.   Senior citizens who volunteer to share their expertise in skills and disciplines with senior citizens who hunger to learn and renew themselves model a civility that is rare in the academic world.   Blessed are the elderly, for they shall be elsewhere sooner rather than later, and they shall take with them a neat paradox: the unpleasant pleasure of the text, the African American narrative. The People Program directors stress that senior citizens should have fun, should discover or re-discover the joy of learning.   Since spring of 2018, I have volunteered to direct four classes that focus in whole or in part on African American narratives, displacing traditional student/teacher exchanges in a classroom with conve
Read more